Long Sunday

smoking or drinking together

My friend Richard Cavell is something of an evangelist for Marshall McLuhan. Whom, hitherto, I had thought to be little more than a one-note sixties media theorist with a gift for the soundbite. Now deservedly forgotten. I suspect that my assumptions are shared by others. But encouraged by Richard's enthusiasm, albeit in some shame that I am not going straight to the horse's mouth, I have started reading his book McLuhan in Space. Is it not worth trying to learn from that decade's counter-culture heroes?

Handmaids' Tales

Cardinal O’Connor’s comments today seem to me to raise some interesting issues, but also shed as much heat as light (apologies to Matt for the metaphor). So, after you’ve read it, my two pence worth. “Women demand tougher laws to curb abortions”. 1) Women are demanding this, and since they are the ones with authority on the issue, we have learned since the 1980s (rightly in my opinion) their newfound doubt (their conversion perhaps?) is, as the insinuation goes, that much more decisive. Thus the headline speaks for itself and seems to need no further justification. 2) The recommendation gleaned from the small group canvassed are not strictly speaking asking for a ‘curbing’ of abortions; the loaded term implies quantity rather than the real issue - time limit. 3) I know exactly what programme the Cardinal has been watching – I watched it myself. And whilst I marveled at the technology which can show us a grimacing foetus, I don’t think it changes the fundamentals of the issue in any more than a contingent, subjective way (and the programme itself was tendential in its use of a voice-over  to humanise a foetus; foetuses don’t speak, and it is somewhat irresponsible to suggest otherwise). 4) The key issue remains that the right to choose is more about the foreseen conditions of motherhood, of the situation - economic, social - in which a child is to be raised, and not the simple and Manichean issue of termination of a depersonalized versus a personalized entity. The Cardinal is looking within when he should be looking without.

Nation's Snowmen March Against Global Warming

With the current heated discussion regarding the difference between "symbolic politics" and "conventional politics" proper, I was reminded of the following fake news item from the Onion.  The Onion is very good at mimicking the sound and feel of how "real news" is presented for our consumption. What seems relevant for our purposes is how the notion of "protesting" is presented as absolutely ridiculous.  The suggestion seems to be that people march and complain for just about anything, with the obligatory appearance by Jesse Jackson added for good measure.  While I generally enjoy the humor (and do not take the Onion too seriously), it does seem to reflect a certain general attitude about politics, particularly of what now may be described as largely "symbolic" expressions of resistance.

difference without apologies

It's a well-worn argument to suggest that the Left (whatever exactly that is) should spend more time learning from the Right (ditto), taking a few leaves out of the books of Reagan, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush, the Republican Party, Harper, what or whomever have you...

A right to existence?

My very post-structuralist (foucauldian, derridean, gramscian) partner and I got into a 'discussion' yesterday evening, one of those 'discussions' that quickly deviates from its initial setting to become something else. We had started talking about Hamas and the quick retreat of many commentators and officials from a pro-democracy position. For such commentators, democratic election was insufficient for legitimacy. Of course, one of the interesting puzzles in democratic theory is how to think the limits of democracy, but that's not where our 'discussion' led.

Instead, we went from the right of Hamas to govern to the right of Israel to exist to a right to exist per se. And, I found myself taking the position that there is no right to exist; that nothing has a right to exist.

Why? It seems to me that the fact of existence is morally neutral, that it is a matter of ontology. And, to say that existence is a right is to make a kind of category mistake (one that I think Hobbes makes): one takes the fact of persistence, that what exists may strive to keep existing, to mean a right of persistence.

para-digm

Let's read that one again.  In contestation with dogmatic misinterpretations of both his own work (especially Remnants of Auschwitz, as paradigmatic rather than para-digmatic) and that of Foucault (as purely "metaphorical" rather than paradigmatic), and with Kant (whose 'example' remains "the example of a [universal] rule which cannot [itself] be stated") – contestations which go to the heart of his philosophical project (as signaled most clearly in The Coming Community and Potentialities), Agamben wishes to show that, on the contrary, "the logic of the example has nothing to do with the universality of the law."  Right then.

More precisely: 

Weber/Schmitt

A 'short' extract from a larger piece I'm currently working on.  The point of the larger piece is to understand the relation of the social to the political in political sociology.  This section, on Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, takes their concept of the political as one of the strongest positions within political sociology.  This section attempts to articulate their work on the political and point to reasons why it may be found wanting from the perspective of political sociology.

Subsequent sections will look at Pierre Clastres and Marshall Sahlins on 'primitive societies', Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort on 'modern societies', and the final major section will look at how Lefort and Giorgio Agamben draw upon Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies.

[Long: approximately 5000 words.  Crossposted to theoria.]

political correctness is just alright with me

Prof. Alan Wolfe recently commented on Bernard Henri-Levy's new book on America -- which copies Tocqueville's approach to America -- saying that one of the things he liked about it was that the author did not dismiss out of hand "political correctness" as a cultural movement in America.  Go here for more.

I don't think Prof. Wolfe is a big friend of political correctness -- though I don't know that for a fact -- but he (so it seems to me) thinks it is important enough of a cultural phenomenon not to be just simply dismissed with scorn.  But enough trying to characterize Wolfe's view, which should be left to him anyway.  Let's take his implicit challenge seriously.  What is the "balance sheet" of political correctness? How much 'good' has it caused and how much 'evil'?  Here we have this contested term -- political correctness -- and my question is:  What would it look like to do a serious intellectual, cultural, and social inventory, as opposed to a merely partisan and polemical one?  I'm sure we all hope there's a difference between those two modes!

Why Not Vote?

Pro-democratic, anti-vote posts on the recent Canadian election:

Archive "Canada Elect"
Leiter Reports "Thoughts from Canadian Readers on the Election Results?"
Long Sunday "Why I'm Not Voting Today"
Out of the Driver's Seat "Why I Hate Elections", "Canadian Election Results"
Posthegemony "Election"
Theoria "January 23, 2006"

If you're the sort of person who likes to vote:

Tilting At Windmills "A Brief and Brutal Voting Guide", "Our Election Endorsement"

And the stakes in the election:

Conservative Party "Stand Up for Canada" [pdf]
Green Party "Platform 2006" [pdf]
Liberal Party "Red Book" [pdf]
New Democratic Party "Getting Results for People " [pdf]

Finally, our new Prime Minister:

Blogging of the President "The Conservative Platform"
Christian Coalition International (Canada) "Rediscovering the Right Agenda"
rense.com "God Bless Canada?"

Please reply with any other links.

Why I'm not voting today

  election 
  Originally uploaded by Sohrab Kabuli.

I’m not going to vote today.  If I did, I’d feel better.  I’d feel like I was part of some kind of democratic nation, like I was voicing my opinion.  But the candidates have never been worse, and though I’d still vote for the social democratic party here as the least evil, a lot of other people who will want to vote this way won’t for fear of the Conservatives getting in.  They’ll vote strategically for the Liberals, even when they really wanted to vote NDP (the social democratic party).  Without proportional representation we are disenfranchised.

I don’t want to feel better.  I’m really upset by the state of this so-called democracy, and I think I should keep feeling that way.  If I go to vote, I can step back from this pathos and think that I’ve done my duty (no need to worry for the next 4 years).  We all agree we hate this system as it now stands, and then we go to vote.  I think people that vote are really quite dumb.  If you hate the whole system, why reproduce it as such?

Go spoil your ballot, then, you might say.  A very good suggestion, but the problem is that the media still include that in their reports of how many people came out to vote, so that they are included in the percentage of the electorate who came out to vote.  And so, they add to the number of people who take part in the system, when the point would be to see less than half of eligible voters actually vote (or, of course, for everyone to spoil their ballots – it’s easy to see how even if half of the electorate spoiled their ballots, the consequences of this would be under-reported, and/or blamed on some technical difficulty with the voting procedure itself).

One’s duty is not absolved by stroking a pencil once every 4 years.  I’m getting very aggressive with people who say or infer they’re disappointed with me for not voting.  “You can’t complain if you don’t vote”.  Oh I see, you’re only voting to maintain your Beautiful Soul position. 

If you step back from voting, then you suddenly want to actually do something for the transformation of the system – and you acknowledge your own place within it.  This is the precise opposite of “voter apathy”; it is precisely because I feel so much pathos that I won’t just make myself feel a bit better by voting.  I’m willing to suffer this hell for the sake of something Other.